The Democratic Hack Gap

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I just want to echo Ezra Klein’s thoughts on what he calls the “Democratic hack gap.”

Here’s what he means. Ann Coulter, that crazy-eyed banshee who moonlights as a conservative commentator, recently said, “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democratic president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, a personal fantasy of mine.”

Soooo, that’s pretty nuts. But liberals won’t make a big deal out of it for two reasons: (1) they just want Ann Coulter to go away, and pulling their hair out over her latest piece of insanity will just draw more attention to her, and (2) this quote is obviously out of Coulter’s quasi-tongue-in-cheek rhetorical register, and because it appears half-serious liberals feel stupid arguing its merits.

Fair enough. But Ezra points something else out. He writes, “There’ll be a fair amount of meta commentary on why this doesn’t make it into the papers, or get the sort of coverage that the “Betrayus” ad did, but not a lot of genuine, direct outrage that would actually launch it into said papers. But there should be. It’s a despicable thing to say.”

He could just as easily replace “genuine outrage” with “phony outrage” — functionally, it’s the same thing. We need more Rush Limbaughs on the left, the argument goes. More Sean Hannitys and Michelle Malkins. Dare I say, more Ann Coulters.

Whether or not we’d still want to be liberals if we shared our political space with the likes of those is up for debate (we don’t win just for playin’ nice, folks), but the fact that the hack gap exists cannot be denied.

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